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Saturday, February 13, 2010

Back me up, Scotty! Aehm, BackupPC.

went to a two days business trip (exhausting and the current train situation a bit annoying...),

spent a nice evening with my colleagues (oops, I totally forgot about our Indian style dinner),

in the same night, I helped my neighbor since her husband had a hypoglycemia and required emergency medical services,

then overslept the day after,

tried to support some colleagues with their pilot study (some computer in the network did say goodbye), ...

... and finally I got called by my girlfriend who told me that her computer had been stolen. Oh dear, what's next?

Unfortunately, she requires the notebook computer for her day job, so there wasn't that much time find a suitable replacement. Now, about 24 hours later, we already bought another one, set it up with Ubuntu Linux, and restored most of the data.

Why is that so important that I wanted to tell you in a blog post? The reason is to say "Thank you!" to the people in other open-source projects who do a great job to make others' lifes easier. For example BackupPC - the system that saved (most of) my weekend :-)

BackupPC resides on a little server and scans the computers in the local network. If it detects a known one, it connects via a SSH tunnel and syncs the files to RAID disks. The file history can then be accessed via a web interface which also provides to (usually) easily restore them including access rights. The goood thing is, no one has to worry about doing the backups manually.

So please guys, keep an eye on your data. Usually, one realizes how important it is once it is lost... :-)